2018/04/04

FRIENDSHIP

I still remember 5-year-old me running around and calling everybody that I've talked to or played with for one day my friend. As I grew up, the childish, almost utopian world image changed and so did my understanding of the word "friendship".

People always make such a fuss about relationships and love. They fight for relationships that are already irreparably broken; they invest their everything into it; some people even are ready to give up themselves in order to make things work. Of course, this is very generalised and not applicable to every relationship (thank God!). And don't get me wrong, I feel like a relationship is something beautiful, prestigious and definitely worth fighting for. Loving and being loved by someone is probably one of the best feelings a human will ever get to know.

But there are other forms of love in everyone's life, too. One of them is friendship. If you had to class the people in your life into "friends", "colleagues" and "acquaintances", how many would you qualify as friends? Personally, I can count my friends on two hands, which is more than most people have probably. And I consider myself very lucky to be surrounded by such amazing people.

Of course, friendship means something different for everybody. To me, friendship is when you are ready to put someone else's happiness and wellbeing before your own, which by the way, is my definition of a healthy relationship, too. Yet, a friendship is so much more than just that.

I'm no one to easily trust other people - I've learnt at a very young age that trusting people can make yourself vulnerable and relying too much on others can be the origin of unhappiness and serious trouble. Nonetheless, I have a hand-full of people that I would trust my life with, which is not only a lucky situation but a necessity to happiness.

Human beings aren't meant to go through life alone, hence why we are always searching for others to connect with and have around. Some people are on a constant hunt to find a special someone, while I consider a true friendship more worth than a relationship, especially at my age.

Relationships are very fragile. In a society where we are shown and taught that you have to throw away everything that doesn't work and replace it with something new and better, we start to think that it's the same for human relations. A friendship, on the other hand, can last you a lifetime.

When I first found out that I got accepted to uni and that I would move away shortly, I started to think that I would find new friends in London and that my old friends would kind of forget about me, which made me quite sad. I assumed stuff like that without having experienced anything like this before. And looking back at it now, I was not only totally wrong but also super dumb to think such things. Of course, I've lost contact with some people that I was close to during my high school years, but the core of my friends is still there. I learnt that nowadays it's easier than ever to stay in touch with the people you truly want to stay in touch with. Even if I don't talk to some people for days, weeks or even months doesn't mean I consider them to be lost and our friendship over, because whenever I see them again, it's as if we've never been out of touch. And I know that no matter what happens, those are the people I can call at impossible times and they will pick up and try their best to listen to me and help me out.

Conclusion. Have I found new friends in London? Yes, I've met some of the nicest and coolest people here and consider myself to be very lucky for that. Have I lost contact with all of my friends from home? No, I haven't lost contact with a single friend. Because honestly, if distance is really a reason to lose contact and makes you not even worth sending a text, were they really friends in the first place?